How enterprises really protect their data
Whatever the future of work holds is debatable, but one thing is certain: digital collaboration and file transfer are here to stay. This implies the employment of secure technologies for online collaboration is vital for building a sustainable, flexible workspace. We wanted to find out in our survey at which point of this journey companies were, what challenges they were facing, and what their perception of security was.
Employers may have been forced to come to terms with traditional attitudes towards remote working and collaborating across distributed teams. However, the methods that some employers and individuals are using to facilitate online collaboration and filesharing are often less than secure - contrary to the bold claims many companies make regarding the state of their security.
Many factors are at the root of this false sense of security. The rapid spread of new cloud platforms makes it hard for companies to oversee and control their tool landscape and maintain an appropriate level of security. The often complicated, jargon-heavy claims of cloud providers who are driven by winning the “security battle” for the title of “most secure tool” causes even greater confusion for companies when it comes to procuring new tools.
Couple this with the rising threat of hacking/phishing attacks, the requirement to rapidly digitize lines of business and the ever-growing compliance pressures on a local and industry level, and you’re left with a ticking security time bomb that many companies will fail to defuse before company and customer data will be compromised. Although, good organizational and technical practices on data security like encryption, data classification or security policies are known to companies, they haven’t been fully adopted yet.
Even though in recent years encryption has had a bit of breakthrough in the business world, real end-to-end encryption coupled with client-side key management is rare on the cloud collaboration market. Accordingly, many organizations are relying on partly encrypted tools, which might leave them with unsuspected security vulnerabilities.
To highlight these risks and help businesses understand how they measure up to direct competitors and other industry verticals and what they are using to secure their data, we collaborated with leading research agency Opinion Matters. We aimed to unpack key opinions and insights around data protection/security threats by speaking to decisionmakers within enterprises and SMB’s across key industry verticals.
Key Survey Insights
1. The risks of sharing files have increased since the start of the pandemic.
72% of respondents agree or strongly agree that having an ultra-secure solution to share files externally is more important than it was before the pandemic.
2. Many industry leaders have been lulled into a false sense of security about their current collaboration solutions.
74% of all respondents agree or strongly agree that the current solutions they use for external collab are secure enough – despite the fact that security vulnerabilities of their tool suites and a loss of control over files (as were highlighted by the same group) are key concerns.
3. Too many tools spoil the broth.
A multitude of file sharing tools is being used to facilitate external collaboration, which presents an IT security risk and a lot of openings for would-be hackers or cybercriminals.
4. Companies are lagging behind when it comes to the use of fully integrated E2EE coupled with client-side encryption key management.
While the majority of respondents (65%) have firmed up their security either with additional key management or with an E2EE solution, only 30% have adopted fully integrated client-side E2EE.
5. Unsurprisingly, heavily regulated industries have more mature data security policies.
Finance, legal and manufacturing are the top 3 adopters of additional key management and E2EE.
Want to dive deeper? Find out here how Tresorit can help keep your enterprise communication channels ultra-secure.
